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Truth Telling and Truthfully Yours

 1949 Leacock Medal Winner
Angeline Hango
“Children are thoughtless things”
Truthfully Yours is an opportunity to reflect on what truth in writing and storytelling really means, why it is important, and what are its challenges. 
Most writers recognize the need for a certain kind of truth or authenticity in their works even when they take the form of fantasy.   A story has to be coherent with its premise even if the premise is implausible, and when someone purports to be truthfully recounting events as they experienced them, we have to believe that they think their version is the truth in order to accept the story whether it is imperfect or incomplete. It is, of course, easier to achieve this effect when one is genuine and openly honest.
Following unfettered imagination may feel liberating, but there is another kind of freedom of expression that comes in truth telling without restriction. From the facts of her life and the temperament of her story, it seems that Angéline Hango had been, just as she asserts, freed from a need to hide the truth and related restraints. 
Telling the truth about difficult times does not naturally lead to a humorous story.  But Hango does so, in part, by downplaying and looking away from the seriousness and the pain.  In doing this, she produces a book that does qualify as both poignant and warmly humorous.  In order to achieve this effect in a genuine way after years of angst, she must have experienced an epiphany that mollified her memories and allowed her to look back with the perspective and bemusement that came through in her words.  She must have absorbed a new level of forgiveness.
At the conclusion of her story, she suggests that the turning point came with her marriage and a coincident personal pledge to abandon fibbing.  But there are hints of another reason in those pages.  Her book makes several references to her own son about the same age as Hango was when she and her sister entered the Convent residential school.   She also speaks of the sacrifices of parenting and the futile hope that children will be grateful. 
“Children are thoughtless things,” Hango tells her readers in the midst of her own story and talking about herself. “That is why it is wrong for a mother (or a father as far as that goes) to deny herself too much for a child, it is not appreciated, not even noticed.”
She thus admits that at this point in her life, the point of writing the book, she has come to appreciate the education she received from the parental effort and caring that she once found embarrassing.
Perhaps, to write both honestly and humorously about difficult events, it is necessary to be both skilled and forgiving.



Review of Truthfully Yours

Truthfully Yours - Actually a Happy Book
 

Truthfully Yours - a "Happy" Book


Despite the poignant, awkward, and sometimes sad events it describes, the 1949 Leacock Medal Winning book Truthfully Yours by Angeline Hango is ultimately a happy book. 
In fact, a search of the text found that the word -
         
         “Happy” - is used 47 times in times in the book’s 144 pages;
             “Laugh”  -  appears 21 times;
              and “Smile” 16.

Whereas “Sad,” “Hurt,” and “Embarrassed” only clock 10, 12, and 11 respectively.
 
Truthfully Yours - Actually a Happy Book

Trivias Humorous - Truthfully Yours


Click for Review of Truthfully Yours

1949 Leacock Medal Winner

by Angeline Hango

The author known to the Leacock Medal as Angéline Hango went by several different names during her life: Marie Roy, Angéline Bleuets,  Angéline Hango, Rose Hango, and Angéline Hango-Burke.

She was born in 1909 and baptized Marie Rose Angéline Roy in the unflinchingly French region of Quebec known today as Saguenay-Lac-Saint- Jean.   Often regarded as the heartland of the sovereignty movement, it is far from English-speaking enclaves and was the venue for the classic Quebec novel Maria Chapdelaine, written in 1914 around the time of the childhood events retold in Truthfully Yours. 
Yet Hango refers to the region by the Anglicization “Lake St. John” – possibly as an inside joke and a self-mocking insinuation of the pretensions and masquerades she is about to confess.

She first distributed the manuscript for Truthfully Yours under the pseudonym Angéline Bleuets meaning  Angéline Blueberries –a reference to the pejorative nickname for the natives of  Lac-Saint-Jean.  Another personal joke hinted at in the pages of her book where she notes that  “people born in that region are called des bleuets.”

Given the personal and unflattering nature of much of her story, it is not surprising that she would initially prefer a pseudonym, and this is consistent with the text of her book which never  reveals any of the main characters names.  They are identified with generic “Papa,” “Maman,” and my sister.

Despite the difficult circumstances it describes, a word count suggests that
Truthfully Yours is actually a Happy Book (click here)

The  Angéline Bleuets pseudonym was name under which she won the $500 Oxford-Crowell Award for her manuscript, setting the stage for its later 1948 publication by Oxford Press.  By the time that book cover was being type-set, she had been convinced to go public under her married name Hango.



Marie Angéline Rose Roy had married John Raymond Hango in 1932 in a ceremony in the author`s home town of Arvida. The groom picked up his unusual last name from inventive immigration officials in the United States where he landed from Finland with the family name Heino. 

The Hangos settled in big, cosmopolitan Montreal and had started a family by the time Truthfully Yours was published. They lived in the Montreal region for the rest of their lives.  There, she would be known and die simply as Rose Hango.

In early 1970 at events related to the centennial of Stephen Leacock’s birth, Hango confirmed that writing Truthfully Yours had been a unique undertaking, and she had not written another book and had been happy to devote herself to her family and other interests.   Hango added, however, that she might write again in old age. 

It was not to be.  She lived to the age of ninety (passing away in 1995), but died as the author of a singular work. 

 =====


What Happened to Hango ?



  Sources

Abebooks.com  Book Description October 15, 2012
Bookseller: Finefinds Collection Management (Kaslo, BC, Canada)  
“Optimism helps Writers,” by Sheila McCook, Ottawa Citizen, Wednesday January 21, 1970, p. 45
Jacket Cover, Truthfully Yours, Angeline Hango, First Edition, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1948 (fragments appended to copy in University of Ottawa Library collection)

Email from R.A. Hango, Vermont, April 17, 2013 email to Canus Humorous



What Happened to Hango ?

After sharing her psyche and personal life with the world through her Leacock Medal winning book, Angeline Hango assumed a low profile; she gave few interviews and never wrote again.  She was happy to pursue personal interests and dedicate herself to her husband and family.
Yet even knowing this, it was surprising to find no biographical information on her on the Internet.   
Even experts who have studied her book from an academic perspective were unable to help as their work focused on her text and her times, not personal life. The Project to record Canada’s Early Women Writers (CEWW) at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. , which is very skilled and did help a bit. 
They confirmed that award-winning Angeline was born in 1905 and “baptized Marie Rose Angeline Roy,” “married John Raymond Hango in Arvida in 1932,” and lived in Montreal into the 1990s. 
Finally, through some searching and guess work based upon her husband's U.S. citizenship and other information, I was fortunate to contact her still living and working son Roy Hango, now in New England.  Born on February 2, 1905, Hango died November 9, 1995 in Montreal.



 

Leacock teaching a little boy to Fish - Old Brewery Bay


Nice gift from local Ottawa artist ... 

Painting of Stephen Leacock teaching a boy to fish at his home on Old Brewery Bay near Orilla - his famed boat house - where dreams are made and where he wrote Sunshine Sketches and other works.